Page 468 - Excel 2013 All-in-One For Dummies

450 Protecting the Spreadsheet
After you turn on protection in the worksheet, only the users you’ve desig- nated are able to edit the cell range or ranges you’ve defined. Of course, you need to supply the range password to all the users allowed to do editing in the range or ranges at the time you distribute the workbook to them.
Be sure to assign a password to unprotect the worksheet at the time you protect the worksheet if you want to prevent unauthorized users from being able to make changes to the designated editing ranges in the worksheet. If you don’t, any user can make changes by turning off the worksheet protec- tion and thereby gaining access to the Allow Users to Edit Ranges command by clicking the Unprotect Sheet command button on the Review tab of the Ribbon.
Doing data entry in the unlocked cells of a protected worksheet
The best part of protecting a worksheet is that you and your users can jump right to unlocked cells and avoid even dealing with the locked ones (that you can’t change, anyway) by using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys to navigate the worksheet. When you press the Tab key in a protected worksheet, Excel jumps the cell cursor to the next unlocked cell to the right of the current one in that same row. When you reach the last unlocked cell in that row, the pro- gram then jumps to the first unlocked cell in the rows below. To move back to a previous unlocked cell, you press Shift+Tab. When Excel reaches the last unlocked cell in the spreadsheet, it automatically jumps back to the very first unlocked cell on the sheet.
Of course, provided that you haven’t changed the behavior of the Enter key in the Editing Options section on the Advanced tab of the Excel Options dialog box (File➪Options or Alt+FI), you can also use the Enter key to move down the columns instead of across the rows. However, pressing the Enter key to progress down a column selects locked cells in that column as well as the unlocked ones, whereas pressing the Tab key skips all those cells with the Locked protection format.
Figure 1-8 illustrates how you can put the Tab key to good use in filling out and navigating a protected worksheet. This figure shows a worksheet cre- ated from a Spa Holiday Hot Tubs invoice template. Because this invoice worksheet in the original template is protected, all worksheets generated from the template will be protected as well. The only cells that are unlocked in this sheet are the cells in the following ranges:
✦ F4:F6 with the invoice number, date, and customer ID fields
✦ C9:C13 with the name, company name, street address, city, state and zip, and phone number fields